Crisis, what crisis? -The al-Qaeda takeover of Syria

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

This is really big news as it means that the Syrian government’s
coastal heartlands including the important port of Latakia, a
Baathist stronghold are under direct threat. It’s a major advance
for the cause of al-Qaeda, yet what is most revealing is the lack
of reaction or any concern from Western leaders.

You‘d think that Western leaders would be alarmed at the al-Qaeda
advances given how much they warn us of the “threat” from radical
Islamists and how many Western troops were lost in the “war on
terror” in Afghanistan.

In fact, the lack of concern regarding the militants’ gains in
Syria exposes the fundamental deceit at the heart of Western
foreign policy. The elites claim to be fighting radical
Islamists, yet in Syria they’re doing everything they possibly
can to ensure that the side that’s fighting radical Islamists,
the secular Syrian government, is weakened and eventually
defeated.

Last month, Syria’s President Assad drew attention to the West’s
phony war against ISIS. He noted that there were only about 10
raids a day from the coalition of “rich and advanced” countries
against the Islamic State. “The Syrian air force, which is
very small in comparison with this coalition, conducts in a
single day, many times the number of air strikes conducted by a
coalition which includes sixty countries. This doesn‘t make
sense. This shows the lack of seriousness…there is no serious
effort to defeat terrorism,” Assad said.

Far from trying to defeat terrorism - the West and its regional
allies have been supporting it.

Israel, the country which we’re repeatedly told by its
cheerleaders in the West, is in the “front line” of the “war on
terror” has been acting as al-Qaeda’s de facto ally in Syria.
It’s made at least ten bombing raids on the country since 2012-
but tellingly, not a single one up to now has been directed at
the radical Islamists fighting Assad‘s forces - all have been on
Syrian government/army targets or on groups fighting with the
Syrian army against the terrorists - such as January‘s attack,
which killed a senior Iranian general and six Hezbollah fighters.
(Today, news broke that another Israeli air strike had killed
“four militants” on the Israel/Syria border - but we don’t know
which groups the ‘militants‘ belong to.)

In March, it was
reported that Israel had opened its borders with Syria to
provide medical treatment to wounded al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda
affiliated Nusra Front soldiers and after treating them, released
them straight back over the Syrian border to continue their fight
against a secular government which protects Christians and other
religious minorities.

The help that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has given to
Syrian rebels at the Golan Heights has been documented
in a series of UN reports.

Israel clearly doesn’t want its activities in Syria to be subject
to too much scrutiny.

A Syrian Druze man who posted information online which detailed
Israel’s co-operation with the Nusra Front was
arrested in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights earlier this
year.

Needless to say, no “Je Suis Sidqi al-Maqt” campaign has yet been
launched by self-righteous “anti-censorship” free speech
crusaders in the west. As the media monitoring organization Media
Lens has observed: “There’s no Je Suis Charlie when it comes
to scrutiny of Israel”.

“Now it seems that Israel is in direct alliance with al-Qaeda
in Syria,”writes Asa Winstanley, in Middle East
Monitor. “This is a tactical alliance, meant purely to bleed
the country and prolong the civil war.”

The de facto Israeli/al-Qaeda alliance gets very little - if any
publicity in the West - we've seen no real debate in our “open”
and “democratic” societies on why our great “ally” is helping
people we’re regularly told are our most deadly enemies . Instead
pro-Israel neocons and faux-leftists, masquerading once again as
concerned “humanitarians” who care passionately about the Syrian
people, propagandize for the imposition of “no-fly zones” knowing
that this will greatly weaken the ability of the Syrian
government to defend their country - a Syrian government which
they desperately want toppled not because of its human rights
record- but because of its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah.

Of course, Israel is not the only major Middle Eastern power
which is gunning for Assad. Saudi Arabia has long called for his
overthrow and seems to have stepped up its support for anti-Assad
forces since the beginning of the year and the accession of King
Salman to the throne. Writing in the neocon Washington Post, Liz
Sly puts the latest “rebel gains” in
Syria down to the role played by the Saudis and its regional
allies.

Weapons that the West supplied to the so-called “moderate rebels”
have - surprise, surprise - fallen into the hands of the al-Qaeda
affiliates. In March, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper showed photographs of Nusra Front fighters
posing with US missiles they had captured from “western-backed
rebels.”

“Al Qaeda groups taking over Syria cities with advanced US
weapons supplied to the ‘moderates’ If you think this wasn’t
planned, think again,” tweets Syria-based analyst and
activist Edward Dark.

Assad’s imminent demise has been wrongly called many times
before-mainly by neocons that couldn’t wait to see the back of
him. But the latest al-Qaeda advances are deeply worrying and
unless the situation on the ground changes quite quickly, then
the days of the secular government in Damascus could be numbered.

The extremists would have got there already, if the British
Parliament had voted to bomb Syria in 2013, as the neocons
wished. “If David Cameron had got his way, the jihadis could
be in control of Damascus by now” the former British
Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, wrote in a blistering attack on British
government policy towards Syria in The Guardian. “To call for
the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, to demonize it
out of all proportion, to predict its imminent fall, as Cameron
and (Foreign Secretary) Hague were doing in 2012 and 2013, - and
then to wail that it was nothing to do with them when British
Muslims set off to hasten said overthrow - is inconsistent and
non-sensensical”, the Ambassador declared.

The approach is indeed “inconsistent”’ and “non-sensensical” if
one takes at face value the Western elite’s claims to be
implacably opposed to al-Qaeda. But of course, they are not
implacably opposed. If the Western leaders like Cameron did
genuinely want to check al-Qaeda's advances then clearly the
logical step would be to work alongside the authorities in
Damascus and not against them which is what they’re actually
doing.

The fact that they don’t seem the least bit concerned about the
recent gains made by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria tells
us once again, that it’s not Islamist radicals that the West is
most concerned about defeating but secular, independently-minded
governments which don’t kowtow to the endless war lobby.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.